That Shenzhen Folk Museum drew fervid media attention was for a fairly remarkable reason. Compared to the other museums founded by her wealthy friends, Maggie’s institution was not significantly sized, nor did it maintain a public relations department. Under her directorship, Maggie arranged all media interviews herself; she preferred merging multiple media requests together as a collective chat. Usually, there were not many interview requests and almost half of the time, such gatherings consisted of familiar faces.
Over time, Maggie’s media arrangements worked like a charm; her tight group of press members began to serve as an informal think tank for her museum. In every gathering, she would steer the conversation towards new trends happening in various industries. Sometimes, she would even catch wind of talents available in the art circle or new and upcoming ideas that have yet to test the waters.
Maggie’s parents were among the first wave of entrepreneurs under China’s reform policy. During her teenage years, her family received visitors of all kinds in their living room. The room appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary, resembling that of any other regular family residence in the Special Economic Zone. The living room served as command central for the family business, just as the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen served a strategic role to China. She remembered vividly the senior visitors who would visit from Hong Kong across the river. Their speech sounded familiar yet flavored with an accent that was hard to describe and a finely grained tone that seemed to resound from the future of such market economy. From years ahead, the men had come back to give the family advice.
“They” seemed much older than “us,” she thought. To a certain extent, the Hong Kong gentlemen not only represented the future, they also offered a window towards ancient China. Although Maggie lived on Chinese soil, its history felt detached and carried along by these men. The situation created a sense of strange alienation that was hard to describe. The men brought Song Dynasty ceramics and scrolled portraits and displayed them under halogen light. These objects were like puzzle pieces that had come via time travel to teach her lessons about Chinese history. Such childhood memories perhaps foregrounded the regular museum office gatherings, where press members would contribute ideas and later turn them into first-hand news. If people really read their reports, it would be difficult to determine what was the opinion of the press members and what was contributed by Maggie herself. In fact, the allure of the museum was not due to its openness, but its open operations enshrouded the institution with an aura of mystery.
Maggie’s private museum, located along the gulf, did not have any photos of its galleries or collections available online. An Internet search would result in only images of its façade and lobby. With not much visual materials to cook with, rumors about the museum still sprouted and spread perhaps due to Maggie’s personal background. In today’s media age, many of the Chinese rich built private art museums and introduced themselves as museum representatives at important occasions. If one did not have a legendary business story, they would find some other topic as leverage. Maggie, however, always presented herself with obscurity. Her museum, as a personal treasure cabinet, became the only indication of her wealth and social status. Though Maggie described her museum as a source of knowledge, it was suspected to be an engine for her wealth. The museum’s exhibitions consistently collaborated with persons related to futurology; these persons were known to have a hand in both cultural and technological industries. Thus it was generally believed Maggie maintained close ties with the technology industry.
So far, most public knowledge about Maggie’s museum had been built upon second-hand information and oral accounts of past museum visitors. Some people claimed that the exhibition hall was actually located in the mind of Maggie and that visitors, like blade runner, must scan her eyeballs to access her visual memory. Exploration. They said, she is the museum itself, and what we discuss is actually what is happening in her mind.
The darker version of this myth was that visitors who entered the museum became the subject of consumption. Like Miyazawa Kenji’s horrifying children’s tale “The Restaurant with Many Orders,” in which eaters become the meat, in Maggie’s museum, observers become the observed. As the story goes, the museum collected visitors’ personal data and used it for illegal purposes in a business scheme maintained by the museum (situated on the border of the financial area) and its adjacent tech industries.
You seem to be amongst the majority of people who read the news but never plan a visit to the museum due its surrounding rumors. However, hesitation has not stopped your curious star from spending substantial time collecting stories that people have spread.
But how can one dispel myths about the unknown? If one does not physically visit the museum, the stories surrounding it only get more and more complicated. Begin inquiring by writing a letter to the museum; that is not a bad idea, it is relatively safe way that also leaves no trace on the Internet. Pick up a pen and explain your intent:
“I have recently read some reports about your company. Out of curiosity, I would like to arrange a time to visit. I have yet to secure information about your current exhibition, and would like to ask, if you could offer a brief introduction?”
To stress your seniority in the field, and justify the reason for writing by post, you elaborate in the letter various public opinions about the museum and state your stance. “Art now is entirely different from what it was when we were young. It was very simple back in the day—just some novel, underground happenings that remained at the fringe.” Yes, the older you are, the more you find that news and updates about the art world have become ever more grotesque and banal, as is the tone of your life.
At this point, you put down your pen; the letter is almost the length of those love letters you had written in your youth. Folding, sealing, and posting, these actions trigger memories of a set of instructions. One step follows another and a feeling of rejuvenation fills your heart.
What a surprise response.
You always thought that China’s Open Door Policy was a just a political slogan. Now you read the handwritten letter and recognize its influence as a state order that had impacted the fate of several hundred million people. The spell had caused a spatial distortion in the Chinese world after 1978, or shall we say, all changes that had happened after 1978 are shrouded in this mysterious code. Shenzhen is now the Asian miracle that Hong Kong was once before. For you now, the speed of Asian cities is like a centrifuge in a laboratory that has not only made possible several economic miracles; it has also produced a sense of crisis along with its force.
You lay out the map of Hong Kong in your mind and survey it in your head. There is nothing there that would appeal to the people of Shenzhen today. But maybe there is one thing will fit the theme:
Like a farewell letter—
In your youth, upon finishing a manuscript, you would send it to your close friends and consider their opinion. But this time, the lines you have written are actually taken from a scene in “2046” in which the protagonist played by Tony Leung fantasizes about Maggie Cheung. The text addresses Maggie Cheung, a woman whom Leung has been mentally engaged with for a long time. The two lines elaborate upon classical sentiments and expose the emotional plot of the entire film. As Leung’s final confession, the written words were placed in a hole of a tree.
By mentioning the title of the film to a character inside the film, Leung offers a key to escape the matrix world created by Director Wong Kar-wai. The two lines slide away from the grasp of film structure and create a chance to derail. However abstruse, Leung’s words retain the moist air of the South that has consistently tempered the atmosphere entire film. Her words serve as an entrance to the world of 2046 like a door made out of words.
But upon closer look, they also serve as a warning for Hong Kong—
The second sentence of the couplet implies the best of times crowned as East Asian miracle, only overshadowed by the subsequent 1997 Handover. In In the Mood For Love, Wong Kar-wai quotes lines from a 1972 novella, Intersection, by Liu Yichang:
“He remembers those vanished years. As though peering through a dusty windowpane—the past was something he could see, but not touch. He always longed for all that had past. If he could shatter that dusty glass, he could walk back into those vanished years.”
The titular Intersection comes form the French term tête-bêche, which refers to a pair of joint stamps oriented upside down from each other. In In the Mood for Love, the two protagonists, starred by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, develop a close friendship when both of their spouses have extramarital affairs. The two husbands and wives begin to weave an intersecting, double-sided narrative, wherein one is always trying to decipher the next line, and the next line is always an inversion of the previous. To ask couples to remain the same for fifty years is indeed impossible. Their story is a manifestation of an emotional knot created by China’s economic reforms and open door policy, saved and stored in a time capsule. As you ponder, you decide to gift these two deeply nuanced written lines to Maggie’s museum project.
It is—
Here is Goldfinch Restaurant on Lan Fong Road, Causeway Bay. Wong Kar-wai shot many of his film scenes here, before the venue went out of business a few days ago. A sign was hung when the restaurant closed. After you lost contact with your Maggie Cheung, for the first time you pushed the doors open, passed through its dark threshold and entered this corner of the city. All restaurants in which Wong Kar-wai had shot movies do not serve good food. For the sake of romantic sentiment, however, you would bring new acquaintances to these restaurants in search of past memories as a film fan. Every time you would order generously but ultimately be disappointed by the results. Perhaps the results prove that the restaurants only exist in rolls of film. The virtual reality of Goldfinch Restaurant belongs to the 60s and only on film as low-fi images of the city.
＊ ＊＊
What was before is no longer—actually, she never properly bid farewell.
In general, to make those who avoid reminiscing speak of the past, you must possess the right characteristics. You may be a tree hole that projects a perfectly silent and innocent appearance, or you are one who remains calm however dramatically the story evolves. An easy set of eyes always attracts those who are eager to shed the weight of their past.
When you met Maggie for the first time, you found her eyes particularly youthful. As you now pass by the traffic signs for Mangrove Nature Reserve and Sea World, you can’t help but think that everything here is 20 years younger than its counterparts in Hong Kong.
If only the past was not covered by the dust of time, it would be easier to take a walk through.
You look at Maggie and continue to say, that the past did, in a way, say goodbye to you. However, in the end, there is never a goodbye that is complete enough. The connection between you and your lover has ended, but it is this past that has held you and her back from the future. The past can be suppressed, but it cannot be erased. A new relationship could only scar you a second time in the same place of an old wound. The pain of two or three wounds feels no heavier than having only one.
On this day, their conversations revolved around one story. Like different configurations of tête-bêche, they talked for an entire afternoon. In the shadow of Hong Kong’s past, one could see impressions of Shenzhen’s present. Movies like those directed by Wong Kar-wai have always sought for an escape to another territory: Buenos Aires, Manila, 2046, these place are similar to Hong Kong, inhabiting populations of dragon blood yet geographically beyond the borders of Mainland China. They provide one united answer to Hong Kong: to flee is the future. Conversely, Shenzhen is also the end of a generational escape. While Hong Kong and Shenzhen mirror each other; their difference lies in fact that that there are not so many unresolvable ends in Hong Kong. For Shenzhen, speed is the answer, for speed does not allow stagnant piles to continue accumulating in a corner. This is the difference between Hong Kong and Shenzhen: In Shenzhen, there is no secret big enough to stir up political and emotional unrest.
